Caprices d'un Bibliophile

A series of light, episodic bibliographic essays and sketches that record a collector's moods, preferences, and vanities. The pieces mix playful preface-like reflections on authorship and style with anecdotal accounts of auctions, private libraries, bindings, publishers, and decorative frontispieces. Writing moves from intimate descriptions of a furnished home and beloved volumes to the public spectacle of salesrooms, tracing the pleasures, anxieties, and ironic contradictions of bibliomania. The tone is capricious and observant, privileging lively fragments, aesthetic detail, and wry commentary over sustained argument or systematic history.